Posts Tagged Dr Who
New Year special – writing sins that scupper a story Part 2: Doctor Who, The Runaway Bride
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Inspirations Scrapbook on December 31, 2010
Weak story links, lazy plotting, wrong point of view, unsatisfying endings… Although Chez Morris we’ve taken time off from writing, we’ve seen some DVDs that have roused me to write posts of protest. So, to keep your critical faculties ticking over until life resumes as normal, I thought I’d share them with you in this five-part mini-series. (And yes, beware spoilers…)
Today: Doctor Who Christmas special – The Runaway Bride
In some ways I liked this as Russell T Davies is a slick, economical storyteller. I admire the way he takes a few intriguing ingredients and builds a script. In this case they are the rock that seeded planet Earth when the solar system was being formed, and ancient particles that have been deleted from the universe. I can imagine Davies daydreaming in school physics lessons and thinking ‘can’t we do something more interesting with the boring old atom?’. He mixes in a bit of showmanship and mayhem at London landmarks (and some soap opera, which I’m a little more doubtful about).
However, although he’s good at the big picture, he’s slipshod with details – and these undermine the whole story.
Writing sin 1: inconsistency in the pseudoscience We’re going to get technical here, so pay attention. Remember the deleted particles? They are attracted to the TARDIS. So one minute the bride, who has been secretly dosed with the particles, is walking down the aisle to get married. The next, she finds herself teleported to the TARDIS – which kicks off the whole story.
But later we meet other characters riddled with the particles who aren’t teleported anywhere.
The Doctor makes a flimsy attempt to explain this by saying the bride’s stress hormones and endorphins activated the particles in some way, but that’s a fudge. It’s obvious as a Dalek in your living room what the real reason is – if the other characters teleported too it would cause story chaos (and inconveniently get them out of a tight spot they weren’t supposed to escape from).
If you invent science, it has to be robust and stick to its own rules. If you find the rules are inconvenient, you can’t add exception clauses in small print. It’s particularly bad to bend them with a dose of exposition from a character who miraculously knows everything (and is therefore a get-out-of-gaol card whenever you like). If your pseudoscience rules don’t work the way you want, you have to rewrite them at a fundamental level or find another solution.
Writing sin 2: absurdity The big baddie is an alien spider creature who is millennia old. Despite this, it inexplicably knows the vows in the modern Church of England wedding service – and makes gags about them. This is clearly Russell T with his pantomime boots on, and it’s irritating. Yes, I do realise a Christmas special needs gags, but they need to make internal sense. Otherwise they smack you out of the world of the story. Oh yes they do.
Tomorrow, or next year: Salt
Until then, Bonne Annee x
Characters: choose their enemies and friends wisely
Posted by Roz Morris @Roz_Morris in Creating a character, Plots, Writer basics 101 on December 19, 2010
Your characters don’t exist in a vacuum, but as a complex ensemble. So choose their friends and enemies carefully
There’s a game going round on Facebook – write down as fast as possible 15 fictional characters who have influenced you and will always stick with you.
This is the list I rustled up:
1 Cordelia (surname probably Lear)
2 Catherine Earnshaw (Wuthering Heights)
3 Jill Crewe (from Ruby Ferguson’s Jill pony books)
4 Doctor Who (Jon Pertwee incarnation)
5 Charles Ryder (Brideshead Revisited)
6 James Bond
7 Lucy Snowe (Villette)
8 Bathsheba Everdene (Far From The Madding Crowd)
9 Eva Khatchadourian (We Need to Talk About Kevin)
10 The narrator of Tanith Lee’s Don’t Bite The Sun
11 Alexa (from Andrea Newman’s eponymous novel)
12 The gay vampire in Fearless Vampire Killers
13 Ray (hitman in In Bruges)
14 Robert Downey Junior’s Sherlock Holmes
15 Purdey (The New Avengers)
I thought of the list in a hurry, as per the rules, and as you can see some of them have nothing to tell a serious student of storytelling. But my choices aren’t the point of this post. The point is, I found the exercise surprisingly difficult.
Only one character?
In each case, I didn’t feel it was fair to single out one character – because their memorable, influencing journeys relied on other characters too.
A character makes a lasting impression because of the other characters they spark off.
To look at my list, who is Cordelia without peevish Lear, scheming Goneril and viperous Regan? Who is Eva Khatchadourian without the terrifying Kevin, sweet Celia and straightforward Franklin? Who is Charles Ryder without his dreary father the divine Flytes?
Characters in a story are like a choir. It takes the whole ensemble to bring out what is in the MC and they deserve the credit too.
What about Lizzie Bennett?
Some characters are so iconic that you could argue they deserve the spotlight to themselves. Lizzie Bennett, for instance – where was my head when I left out her? She’s good value wherever she goes. But we see that only because her sparring partners are so well chosen. Indeed in that respect, Mr Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh are even more delightful than the essential Mr Darcy.
No character operates alone
No character goes through a story alone. Part of the writer’s fun is putting characters with others who will bring out the best, worst, be their opposites, nemesis, thwart them, push them to the edge and put their arms around them.
Who makes your main character most interesting? Who makes them do things? Who gets under their skin? Who completes them – or might destroy them?
So let’s play this game my way. You’ve seen who some of my favourite character combinations would be, and why – tell me some of yours.